End death penalty, author says

Share this:

Prejean – perhaps best known for her book “Dead Man Walking” and its hit movie adaptation starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn – said efforts to tinker with the state’s execution process seem more about protecting witnesses and the public from an ugly truth than about protecting the condemned inmate from a painful death.

SAN FRANCISCO — One of the world’s most renowned activists against the death penalty said California’s postponement of an execution this week underscores the basic inhumanity of capital punishment.

“They’re really facing that there is no humane way to execute someone,” Sister Helen Prejean told a reporter after her address Thursday at the Commonwealth Club of California. “They’re trying to sanitize it and mask it even further.”

Prejean — perhaps best known for her book “Dead Man Walking” and its hit movie adaptation starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn — said efforts to tinker with the state’s execution process seem more about protecting witnesses and the public from an ugly truth than about protecting the condemned inmate from a painful death.

State authorities on Tuesday postponed the execution of convicted murderer Michael Morales after being unable to comply with a federal judge’s order either to have an anesthesiologist ready to intercede should Morales seem to be in pain during administration of the usual lethal three-drug combination, or to have a licensed medical professional administer a single lethal dose of barbiturate.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose will hold a hearing in May on whether the three-drug combination is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. At least until then, his order seems to constitute a de facto moratorium on executions in California, which has almost 650 people on death row.

Prejean, 66, said Thursday this huge number of condemned inmates, combined with the fact that Morales would’ve been only the 14th person put to death in California since the state reinstated its death penalty in 1978, means California has perhaps the nation’s least efficient system.

“You’re not serious about the death penalty, not like we are in the South,” the Catholic nun from Louisiana told a few dozen people at the club’s Market Street office.

She rattled off a litany of flaws in America’s capital punishment system.

Victims’ families “revictimized by the death penalty” after being conditioned to equate justice with a convict’s death, she said. And the criteria by which murderers receive the death penalty are too vague.

“Nobody knows what ‘the worst of the worst’ is,” she said, as evidenced by the fact that 87 percent of those executed in the United States killed white people, while people of color account for well over half of the nation’s murder victims.

“The climate … sure seems to be that outrage is felt over the deaths of some of our citizens, but for others there doesn’t seem to be any outrage at all,” Prejean said, thus creating a “meritocracy of death” in which politicians try to weigh one victim’s life against another, applying the ultimate punishment only in some cases.

“And look what happens — we don’t have a way to do it,” she said. “California certainly doesn’t have a better way to do it than Louisiana or anybody else.”

Prejean bemoaned “right-wing religious extremists” who have taken over the Republican Party, and singled out U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a fellow Catholic, for picking and choosing isolated biblical passages to justify capital punishment rather than taking a truly Christian stance.

One of the audience’s questions came from a student who was there as part of a contingent from San Mateo’s Junipero Serra High School, a Catholic school for boys. In a written question handed up to the podium, he asked what he and others can do to effectively oppose the death penalty.

“Politicians like to be looked up to by young people,” Prejean said, urging youths and others to write letters and attend public meetings to ask tough questions of lawmakers. “California could put the death penalty down if enough citizens would dialogue with the Legislature.”